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CHAPTER 26

Isaac and Abimelech.1*a There was a famine in the land, distinct from the earlier one that had occurred in the days of Abraham, and Isaac went down to Abimelech, king of the Philistines in Gerar.b2The LORD appeared to him and said: Do not go down to Egypt, but camp in this land wherever I tell you.
3Sojourn in this land, and I will be with you and bless you; for to you and your descendants I will give all these lands, in fulfillment of the oath that I swore to your father Abraham.c4I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky, and I will give them all these lands, and in your descendants all the nations of the earth will find blessing—d5this because Abraham obeyed me, keeping my mandate, my commandments, my ordinances, and my instructions.

6* So Isaac settled in Gerar.
7When the men of the place asked questions about his wife, he answered, “She is my sister.” He was afraid that, if he called her his wife, the men of the place would kill him on account of Rebekah, since she was beautiful.
8But when they had been there for a long time, Abimelech, king of the Philistines, looked out of a window and saw Isaac fondling his wife Rebekah.
9He called for Isaac and said: “She must certainly be your wife! How could you have said, ‘She is my sister’?” Isaac replied, “I thought I might lose my life on her account.”
10“How could you have done this to us!” exclaimed Abimelech. “It would have taken very little for one of the people to lie with your wife, and so you would have brought guilt upon us!”
11Abimelech then commanded all the people: “Anyone who maltreats this man or his wife shall be put to death.”

12* Isaac sowed a crop in that region and reaped a hundredfold the same year. Since the LORD blessed him,
13e he became richer and richer all the time, until he was very wealthy.
14He acquired flocks and herds, and a great work force, and so the Philistines became envious of him.
15f The Philistines had stopped up and filled with dirt all the wells that his father’s servants had dug back in the days of his father Abraham.
16So Abimelech said to Isaac, “Go away from us; you have become far too numerous for us.”
17Isaac left there and camped in the Wadi Gerar where he stayed.
18Isaac reopened the wells which his father’s servants had dug back in the days of his father Abraham and which the Philistines had stopped up after Abraham’s death; he gave them names like those that his father had given them.
19But when Isaac’s servants dug in the wadi and reached spring water in their well,
20the shepherds of Gerar argued with Isaac’s shepherds, saying, “The water belongs to us!” So he named the well Esek,* because they had quarreled there.
21Then they dug another well, and they argued over that one too; so he named it Sitnah.*22So he moved on from there and dug still another well, but over this one they did not argue. He named it Rehoboth,* and said, “Because the LORD has now given us ample room, we shall flourish in the land.”

23From there Isaac went up to Beer-sheba.
24The same night the LORD appeared to him and said: I am the God of Abraham, your father. Do not fear, for I am with you. I will bless you and multiply your descendants for the sake of Abraham, my servant.g25So Isaac built an altar there and invoked the LORD by name. After he had pitched his tent there, Isaac’s servants began to dig a well nearby.

26h Then Abimelech came to him from Gerar, with Ahuzzath, his councilor, and Phicol, the general of his army.
27Isaac asked them, “Why have you come to me, since you hate me and have driven me away from you?”
28They answered: “We clearly see that the LORD has been with you, so we thought: let there be a sworn agreement between our two sides—between you and us. Let us make a covenant with you:
29you shall do no harm to us, just as we have not maltreated you, but have always acted kindly toward you and have let you depart in peace. So now, may you be blessed by the LORD!”
30Isaac then made a feast for them, and they ate and drank.
31Early the next morning they exchanged oaths. Then Isaac sent them on their way, and they departed from him in peace.

32That same day Isaac’s servants came and informed him about the well they had been digging; they told him, “We have reached water!”
33He called it Shibah;* hence the name of the city is Beer-sheba to this day.
34* When Esau was forty years old, he married Judith, daughter of Beeri the Hittite, and Basemath, daughter of Elon the Hivite.i35But they became a source of bitterness to Isaac and Rebekah.

* [26:1] The promise of land and numerous descendants given to Abraham (12:1–3; 15; 17; 22:17–18) is renewed for his son Isaac. The divine blessing to Isaac is mentioned also in vv. 12, 24, and 29.

* [26:6–11] This scene is the third version of the wife-in-danger story (cf. chaps. 12 and 20). The mention of the famine in 26:1 recalls the famine in 12:10; the name Abimelech, king of the Philistines in Gerar, recalls 20:2. The deception, according to all the stories, is the claim that the wife is a sister. This story (from the Yahwist source) departs from the two previous accounts in that the wife is not taken into the harem of the foreign king.

* [26:12–33] The dispute is over water rights. In a sparsely watered land, wells were precious and claims on water could function as a kind of claim on the land. Scholars generally judge the account of the dispute over water rights and its settlement by a legal agreement between Isaac and Abimelech to be a Yahwist version of the similar story about Abraham in 21:22–34. Here, Abimelech realizes that Isaac has brought blessing to his people and thus desires a covenant with him. The feast in v. 30 is part of the covenant ceremony.

* [26:22] Rehoboth: “wide spaces,” i.e., ample room to live; site is probably SW of modern day Beer-sheba.

* [26:33] Shibah: the place name Shibah is a play on two Hebrew words, shebu‘ah, “oath,” and shwebaa‘, “seven.” In v. 31, they exchanged oaths.

* [26:34–35] These verses from the Priestly source introduce the next section on Esau’s loss of his right as firstborn by suggesting a motivation for this in Isaac’s and Rebekah’s dislike for Esau’s Canaanite wives.

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